Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (6 page)

“What’s going on?” Sarah asked.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. He felt suddenly silly. Loading his pistol because a helicopter happened to be flying over his house? Maybe it was overkill, but his senses were screaming at him, and he’d survived in his job all these years because he always trusted them. He looked down at the pistol and remembered the axiom he’d learned in training.
If you need it and don’t have it, you’ll never need it again.

Sarah’s eyes narrowed, and she swung into a sitting position, nearly as alert as he was. Schweitzer didn’t scare easily, so when he showed concern, she took it seriously. “Patrick,” she began.

“I’m going to check on him,” he said.

She nodded, and he moved to the top of the stairs just as light thumps sounded on the roof. More shadows streaked past the bay window, too fast for him to see what they were.

Patrick.

Schweitzer’s son’s room was just below them, the window facing the same side as theirs.

The need to check on his son nearly blotted out his senses, and he raced down the stairs, taking them two at a time, the traction of his bare feet the only thing keeping him from falling over.

His feet slapped down on the hardwood floor just as he saw shadows moving across the gap between the floor and front door, backlit by the sconce lighting in the hallway outside. He cast a quick glance at Patrick’s door, shut tight, and took a shooter’s stance, stepping behind the stairwell for cover. The thin wood wouldn’t stop even a nine-millimeter round, but it would obscure the line of fire. Cover was cover. He thought briefly of calling to Sarah and dismissed it. Whoever was on the other side of that door would hear him.

Sarah thought differently. “Honey?” Her voice was edged with panic.

“Stay there, sweetheart!” he shouted back.
The hell she will.
That was Sarah Schweitzer up there.

The door exploded.

A breaching charge was overkill for a flimsy, residential door, but they’d used one anyway, shivering the wood and fiberglass into fragments, sending the brass mail slot spinning over Schweitzer’s shoulder to careen off the wall, ringing like a bell.

Schweitzer ducked behind the staircase long enough to prevent the flash from blinding him, but the boom was loud enough to leave his ears ringing, the sound of the door fragments settling and Sarah’s screaming all coming to him as if from a long way off.

The temptation to empty his magazine into the doorway was strong, but he resisted it. He’d breached many a door in his day, rolling behind the wall and allowing the enemy to expend precious ammunition into an empty doorway. Schweitzer squinted into the entryway, waiting for targets to present themselves. His mind screamed at him to rush to protect his wife and son, but the calm center, the part that had been honed by years of training and experience, knew that the best way to protect them was by dealing with whatever came through that door.

Who the hell was attacking him and his family? Why? Those questions would have to keep. Right now, all he knew was that they were dead men walking. He sighted in his pistol, covering the doorway.

A brief pause, as the assaulters waited for him to shoot, then an arm appeared around the doorjamb, clutching a metal cylinder in a black-gloved hand.

Schweitzer fired. The round tore through the wrist, the arm jerking, the cylinder fumbling and falling to the floor just outside the door, hissing out a plume of gray-green-tinted gas into the hallway.

Another impossible shot. Another perfect hit.

Artistry.

Shouts in the hallway, and four men stumbled into the room, fumbling respirators up and snapping them into place onto their black helmets. They wore state-of-the-art body armor, submachine guns swinging off tactical slings. Black body suits beneath.

The same outfits worn by the men outside the shipping container.

Security was a constant theme in the life of every operator who worked domestic operations. Their identities were carefully hidden, the fact that they were military members the only thing known about them. Personally Identifying Information like phone numbers, addresses, and family data was guarded as if it were classified.

But somehow, the Body Farm had found him.

Later. For now, work.

He fired again, putting a round through the bridge of one enemy’s nose as he did his respirator up, spinning him in a tight circle that sent him spilling into his buddy, throwing them both to the floor. The enemy beside the fallen men looked up, eyes widening as he spotted Schweitzer, jerking up his weapon and firing.

Schweitzer didn’t bother dodging. The shooter hadn’t even bothered to get on the sights, and the rounds flew harmlessly wide, thudding into the wall beside Patrick’s door.

Schweitzer fired again, punching through the shooter’s balaclava and throat, sending him to his knees, hissing through the hole in his neck.

The last man standing wisely didn’t bother with his gun, and instead closed the distance, pulling a knife from his chest sheath. He’d thrown out his left hand as a sacrifice, showing good technique, but Schweitzer was in his domain now. He knew the ground, he had the drop on them. He was doing what he’d been born to do.

Schweitzer ignored the distracting hand, letting it slide over his shoulder and allowing the knife to fill his vision. As it came down, he caught the man’s wrist, turning the bones to rub painfully against the glove’s Kevlar protective plating. The man cried out, and the knife fell to the floor, burying the tip in the hardwood and quivering there as Schweitzer closed the remaining distance, close as a lover, jamming the pistol barrel up under the man’s chin.

He fired, sending the helmet spinning off the man’s head and spraying the last remaining enemy with his brains, just as he shrugged out from under the corpse of the first man Schweitzer had shot, and got to his feet.

Schweitzer grinned at his stunned expression, the slow terror dawning across his face. “You knocked on the wrong door,” he drawled, pushing the corpse into him.

Six more men rushed into the room and Schweitzer’s grin died.

Schweitzer had just enough time to roll behind the stairwell before a shower of rounds tore into the wall. They were well equipped, and good shots by transnational standards, but they would have to do better than that.

A moment later, they did. Bullets whistled through the staircase, one catching Schweitzer’s thigh, a burning hammerblow that dropped him to one knee. He didn’t have time to see how bad it was, to worry whether or not he’d bleed out. He fell onto his side, the thigh wound screaming as it impacted the floor, and leaned around the staircase bottom, firing.

He caught one enemy in the ankle, the man crying out and falling. Another salvo of bullets shredded the staircase. Something heavy and hot fell on Schweitzer, cracking a rib. He grunted and fired again, catching a man in the abdomen, hopefully below his body armor. The smoke filling the room made it impossible to tell where his rounds were impacting.

A high shriek came to him from a few feet away. “Daddy!”

Schweitzer allowed his focus to crack, his eyes to come off the gun sights and toward the sound.

Patrick stood awake in the doorway to his room, his footed pajamas showered with dust, his blond hair a tousled mess, his face pink and eyes shining with tears. “Daddy!” he shrieked again.

As one man, the enemy turned toward him.

Schweitzer’s heart leapt into his throat. “Patrick! No! Get back in . . .”

The stuttering salvo resumed. The muzzles of the enemy guns flashing. Patrick flew back from the doorway, snatched by an invisible hand. A streak of blood traced the floor, an arrow pointing the way he had gone. The door to his room danced, ripped off its hinges and spinning in the air, blotting out Schweitzer’s view of his son.

And then the door covered Patrick, burning, rocking on its edges. His son screamed no more.

Schweitzer screamed for him. His vision swam. The pain of his wounds vanished. He leapt to his feet, shrugging off the wreckage of the stairway, sliding on the floor slick with his own blood.
He’s okay,
his mind told him.
If you can get to him fast enough, you can save him.

A part of him knew it couldn’t be true, that no four-year-old could survive that many rounds. He silenced that part. Another part came alive.

That other part propelled him to the burning door over his son, firing madly, all attempt at accuracy forgotten. He snarled, the world disappearing. The room, the smoke, the enemy, all gone. Nothing existed other than the red tunnel that encompassed the ground Schweitzer had to cover to reach Patrick’s side.

He ran as if through molasses, Patrick’s door growing no closer. Something struck him in his side, his shoulder. He stumbled, sank, kept going.
He’ll be okay. You’ve still got time for CPR.

He heard a shriek and allowed himself a look over his shoulder.

The balcony to their loft bedroom sat above the staircase, offering Sarah a clear view of Patrick’s doorway. She called her son’s name, leaping out over the ragged hole left by the now-burning ruin of the staircase. The guns moved toward the ceiling, spitting rounds into the recessed-can lights, showering all with plaster dust, sparks, and shattered glass. Sarah plummeted, slamming into one of the enemy. Something bright and metal flashed in her hand. Schweitzer blinked and realized it was the tiny, hook-bladed knife she used to cut canvas. The lacquered wooden handle was probably two inches long, the blade scarcely longer.

A mother wolf, she bore the man to the floor, plunging the flimsy blade into his neck above the collar of his body armor, covering herself with a bright spray of arterial blood.
Oh, baby. I knew you wouldn’t stay still.

The man writhed away from her, his finger clamped on the trigger, the gun uselessly spitting rounds into the ceiling. Sarah screamed and stabbed him again and again. He shuddered beneath her.

Her target dispatched, she looked up, eyes lighting on Patrick’s door, not seeing Schweitzer before it. She got to her feet, began to run for her son.

A bullet slammed into her, lifting her into the air, throwing her back into the ruins of the staircase. She spun in the air, twitching, eyes narrowing in shock and agony. Blood misted the air as Sarah disappeared, vanishing into the burning splinters, her body limp.

For the first time in his life, Schweitzer was frozen in the midst of battle. The corpse of his wife before him. The corpse of his child behind him. Which way to turn. No way. There was no way.
They’re not okay. They’re not okay. They’re not okay.

The image of the refrigerated container of corpses flashed in his mind, but this time Patrick and Sarah’s still, blue-lipped bodies lay on the steel racks.
A lot of corpses in one day, huh?

More hammerblows, this time in his gut. Schweitzer took a few steps backward, tried to hitch a breath, couldn’t.

The red tunnel turned gray, narrowed. He couldn’t see Sarah. He tried to turn to Patrick’s door. Couldn’t move.

He looked down.

His chest was smeared with blood, the skin blistered, dotted with splinters.

Below it, he could make out the jagged yellow-white protrusion of his sternum, hovering over the gap that had once been his abdomen.

The curve of his rib cage held the ribbons of his abdominal muscles, hanging in flaps over the dark recesses of his gut, laid open by what must have been a considerable volume of fire. Long gray-blue ropes had uncoiled from inside, draping down to his knees. He watched, numb, as they slid farther.
Sarah? Sarah? I’m hurt.
His mouth worked. He felt something warm and sticky sliding down the corner.

The tunnel narrowed farther, his vision blurring, the edges of what little he could see going indistinct. He didn’t have time for this, he had to get to Patrick, but he couldn’t move.

One of the enemy stepped into his field of vision. He was still spattered with his comrade’s brains, the last of the original four who’d come in. He stepped close to Schweitzer, intimately close, eyes slits of rage. Schweitzer could smell the sour stink of his breath through his balaclava. He was a coffee drinker. Smoker, too.

“We knocked on the right door, asshole,” the man said.

Schweitzer could feel the cold firmness of a gun barrel shoved underneath his chin. He tried to punch the man, smack the gun down. Fight. Anything. He couldn’t move.

Sarah.

Bang.

AWAKE

There was no pain.

That was the first thing Schweitzer was conscious of. Nothing hurt. He was neither cold nor hot. Neither closed in, nor spread out. No smells. No sounds. No sensations. There was simply nothing. Nothing but this certainty; he could think. He was himself.

He was alive.

Sarah.
He felt for her, strained to hear a snatch of Patrick’s cries. Where were they? Where was he? He still couldn’t move, but now it wasn’t because his body wouldn’t obey him. He couldn’t feel a body at all. There were no muscles to strain, no mouth to grimace with.

Am I dead? Is this what death is?

The thought filled him with panic. He’d learned long ago not to dwell too much on death or what it would be like. That was a short road to madness in his line of work. But in his weak moments, he’d imagined the things he’d learned in church or debated on the middle-school playground. Death would be a lake of fire, or a cloud covered with angelic harpists, or a simple end to everything.

But never this. Never consciousness without action. Never life without life.

An eternity of this would drive him mad.

He struggled to calm himself. If he was thinking, he was alive. Maybe he was in a coma. Maybe they would find a way to revive him. And if they could revive him, maybe they could do the same for Sarah.

Oh God, Sarah. Patrick. Oh God.

He fought against the thought, the panic it inspired. It seemed he was a disembodied mind. His stomach couldn’t turn over. His balls couldn’t hike into his abdomen. But panic he could feel.

Rosewater. He smelled rosewater. He tried to flare nostrils he couldn’t feel, to sniff air into nasal passages he no longer possessed. Nothing.

He struggled to track the scent, to follow it. There was only darkness.

And then it was gone.

In its place, a presence. It enveloped him. It gripped him, draping him like a lover in the afterglow, tendrils dug into every cranny of his floating consciousness. Stifling.

He struggled, whirled, tried to throw it off, but how could he, with no body to move?

The thing probed, licked at him, pushed in. It drank his thoughts, digging into his secrets, his memories. The violation was total, he was laid bare before this thing, could feel it exulting in its knowledge of him, its raping of the long years of his history. It sifted his past and pressed closer, hungry.

Years in the SEALs had taught him to adapt.
When you’re under fire, you don’t just sit there. You get off the X. Moving the wrong way is still moving.
His physical senses were gone, the rosewater scent a teasing ghost that tricked him, a phantom limb of a smell. He had no body to use, or if he did, it was full of traitor nerves that would not report or obey. He relaxed, stopped trying to reach out to his dead physical self. He drove his consciousness in reverse, seeking the presence. He pushed back into it, and recoiled.

It was cold, ancient. Though his physical senses were gone, his consciousness still clung to them as parameters to define his experience. The presence felt like dry parchment, gray ice, jagged bone.

Its malevolence was plain. It bore no goodwill. It held him like some giant tick, a cuttlefish latching onto its prey.

He felt its surprise that he reached back for it, felt it take his measure.

And then it spoke.

No words. There was simply a vibration in his mind, the tremors of communication that his consciousness registered as speech. It was as if an army of discordant voices spoke at once, from a field of distances—some shouting in his nonexistent ears, some calling softly from the bottom of a well. It spoke in a hundred languages. Some he understood, some were hauntingly familiar, some impossibly alien. It was sensual, mocking, harsh.

It was legion.

You are with me now, and we will make a mighty work together.

Schweitzer tried to follow the voice, perceive the speaker, had to forcibly fight his instinct to try to see it physically. He tried to answer, had no mouth to speak with. He roiled first with frustration and finally fear, until at last he forced the panic away, focused back on his floating consciousness, and reached out to the thing again.

How . . . ?
he managed. His mind fell back on instinct again and tried to talk through an absent mouth.

Good,
the thing answered.
You are a quick study.

How are you . . . ? Where am I?

There is no “where.” We are together. We are one. You were once called James Schweitzer. That name is lost to you now.

The thought made the panic spike. He tried to calm himself, think the way he had once spoken when backed into a corner, conjure some of that swagger.
Then what are we calling me these days?

The voice laughed, or thought a laugh. It resounded in his mind like the cracking of dried twigs.
You are called nothing. When you are called at all, you are called through me.

And who are you?

I am Ninip,
the thing said, intoning its name like a priest with a blood offering,
and I am war.

There, again, the barest hint of fragrance. Sarah’s homemade perfume, maddeningly close, the origin masked by the confused darkness.

Sarah!
he cried out.
Patrick!
He strained his mind, the same poor facsimile of hearing through which the presence spoke to him. If he was dead, maybe they were here with him. Maybe they could answer.

But it was Ninip’s voice he heard, the grating rasp of chains dragged over stone.

They are lost to you,
the presence said, the tone suddenly crooning, sympathetic. He felt its touch again, warming now, a reassuring arm across his nonexistent shoulders.
I am your family now.

Schweitzer shrugged the arm away.
Bullshit. How the fuck do you know?

I know death,
Ninip said.
Soon, you will, too. For now, you must trust me.

The scumbags Schweitzer routinely operated against enjoyed kidnapping for ransom nearly as much as they did arms sales and blowing stuff up. The first rule of negotiation was always proof of life.

Bullshit,
he said.
Show me bodies.

He blinked into the darkness, or tried to. If he could smell Sarah’s perfume without a nose, then maybe he could see her without eyes.

You doubt the darkness.
Ninip sounded tired.
The new ones always do. You still cling to the tinctures of life. Very well. Look upon the world again, for all the joy it may bring you.

Schweitzer’s vision went from black to white. Sensation followed. His muscles locked, tensed over sturdy bones. His eyes blinked, and his nostrils flared. He lolled a dry tongue, thick in a parched mouth. He flexed fingers.

He could feel his body responding to the commands he sent it, but there was something wrong. All his senses came to him at a remove, as if he were hearing about the world thirdhand, a tale told by an expert narrator who, for all his skill, couldn’t capture the spirit of the thing.

Look,
Ninip commanded.

Schweitzer blinked again. The whiteness flickered into static, then slowly began to resolve into color and depth.

He was lying on a metal table, surrounded by men with guns leveled at him.

He sat up, his torso rising effortlessly, no sensation of his abdominals engaging or his thighs flexing to compensate.

The presence stayed with him. The feeling of envelopment, of intrusion, didn’t fade in the least. Ninip’s being was so close to him that he imagined he could hear the thing breathing.

Inside him. Ninip was inside him, in his heart, in his head, in the atoms of his flesh.

They shared his body. Two souls in a single shape.

Am I possessed?
His thoughts now gave voice inside his own mind, and Ninip heard and answered.

Some call it so, but they are fools. You are bonded. You are wed. You are better.

Schweitzer looked around the room.

It was a hospital, but secured like no hospital he’d ever seen. The room was windowless, about twenty feet across and bare save for a wheeled standing desk covered with computer equipment. The door looked to be made of solid steel, with locking bars that would make a bank vault look weak. To either side, tall red tanks stood, lines running to nozzles placed around the room, tiny blue pilot lights burning below them. A broad red button stood beneath a plastic flip-up shield beside the door.

Whoever built this place wanted to be able to burn whatever was inside at the touch of a button.

Soldiers surrounded the table, carbines leveled at Schweitzer’s head. They were kitted out for war, helmets, heavy body armor, grenades. One of them held a flamethrower, blue pilot flame flickering from the tip.

At their head stood an older man, wild white hair and whiskers giving him a reasonable likeness to Mark Twain. He wore an immaculate lab coat with a plastic badge clipped to the breast pocket. It showed only his face, the Department of Defense seal, and a single name:
ELDREDGE
.

The man scowled, frown deepening until his eyes positively blazed hatred. He hunched, fingers hooked into claws. Shadows danced between his legs and beneath his armpits, haloing him in curling black mist. The shadows cavorted around the soldiers’ boots, writhed about their weapon muzzles, dripping red at the edges, tinting all in blood.

The man said something, a barking sound, the coughing of an angry monkey, his teeth glinting wetly as his lips parted. The recesses of the room bent and wavered, fading in and out of focus, making Schweitzer doubt their stability. The table was a shelf beneath his buttocks and thighs, his feet dangling out over an abyss.

He looked down. A threadbare hospital gown flapped off him, tattered and filthy. The air vents hissed, rasping filthy gas into the room. Maybe poison.

This is the seen world, the felt world,
Ninip said.
It is not so pretty as you left it.

This isn’t the world,
Schweitzer said.
You’re a fucking liar.

And as he said it, so it was.

He felt his vision peel at the edges, the veneer lifting ever so slightly, until he could discern the filter, thinner than onionskin, draped over his senses.

There were two souls sharing his body, two sets of senses perceiving the world. This horrid landscape of foul smells and threatening visages was Ninip’s view. Schweitzer shuddered to think of a life lived on this brutal plain: every movement a threat, every sound a warning, every touch a blow.

He rebelled against the perception, reaching out with his spirit to peel away the layer that filtered his sense of the world.

He felt the presence dig in, tendrils chafing against his soul, clutching and pulling, struggling to hold on to its control over their shared perception. It battered his consciousness, closing their shared eyes, clenching their shared hands.

Stop,
Ninip said.
A comfortable lie is still a lie. I am showing you the truth. Do not exchange it for the duped sleep of the contented.

Schweitzer ignored it, chipped away, pushing back. At long last, he gave an inward shout, and the veneer fell away, the world coming into normal focus again.

The man in the white lab coat frowned down at him, but he did not scowl. The soldiers around him came into stark relief, the shadows gone, their uniforms familiar. The hospital gown was clean and blue. The air vents ran smooth and silent in the background, blowing sweet, clean air.

You are a fool,
hissed Ninip,
and you will reap a fool’s reward.

The man in the white coat leaned in close. “Can you hear me?” His voice was gentle.

Yes,
Schweitzer responded, realized he was speaking internally to Ninip, that his lips hadn’t moved. Schweitzer struggled, sucking in air, forcing it down his windpipe, feeling his lungs inflate, puffing out inside his chest cavity, then forcing them to squeeze the air up and out again, choking the muscles of his throat down around the air as it pushed out of his mouth.

“Yes,” he said, recoiled at the thick croaking that came out, not even close to a human word.

The man’s eyebrows arched. “Very impressive. It takes most of our . . . new arrivals much longer to master even the rudiments of speech.”

Schweitzer felt sick panic, looked down, yanked up the hospital gown.

His stomach was whole, a long trail of sutures running a railroad-track pattern from just above his crotch to the base of his sternum.

His skin was hairless, the white-gray of a fish’s underbelly.

He flared his nostrils, smelled the stale, antiseptic odor of the room.

But the scents weren’t guided to him by his breath. He stilled himself, watched his torso.

He wasn’t breathing.

You have not been listening,
Ninip said.
You are with me now. We are a fortress. We are mighty, and together we shall have the gate of our enemies.

That’s nice,
Schweitzer said.
We’re also dead, aren’t we?

The memories flooded him. Patrick crumpling beneath a burning door. Sarah falling backward through the air, a bullet chewing through her tender flesh, blood misting the room.

A pistol barrel jammed beneath his chin.
We knocked on the right door, asshole.

An explosion. Darkness.

Schweitzer lowered his head.

He felt Ninip curl around him, could imagine the presence as a serpent coiling about his shoulders, forked tongue flicking in his ear. Grief subsided, anger heightened, rising until his muscles bunched.

We will avenge you,
Ninip said.
We will avenge your family. Our vengeance will be legend. Our enemies will sing of it for generations.

Schweitzer found himself leaning into the voice. The thought of vengeance sang in his soul. The fuckers who’d killed him, killed his family would pay. Somehow he’d cheated death. Maybe it was only to give him a second chance to make things right.